The Canadian Anglicans came within a hair’s breadth of allowing dioceses to allow same-sex blessing yesterday. The measure was passed decisively by laity and clergy and then defeated by a couple of votes in their House of Bishops. Rather an uncomfortable situation for one or two bishops, I would guess.

It rather highlights something which I’ve thought for a while. These debates are, on the face of it, about gay people. Those who are opposed to same-sex blessings think that in their hearts that this is really about “the authority of scripture”. However, the real issue which we are debating now has long since moved on. What we are trying to work out is how we square an episcopal system with a synodical one. If you look at the comments of people on blogs and elsewhere when something like this comes up in a synod, it is almost impossible to conclude that there is a strong belief for many Anglicans that the Holy Spirit is involved in synodical government. [The pneumatology of the blogsphere is appallingly lax, if you want to be technical about it].

There are those who believe that the Scottish Episcopal Church is an episcopally ordered church. It isn’t of course, it is a synodically ordered church in which bishops have to find their place. What that place is, is at the heart of so much of this debate, and we share that debate with others in the Anglican Communion. Do theology, doctrine, liturgy, truth etc flow from the bishops into the church? Of course not, but we have yet to decide their role and it must be horrible for them to live through this time.

I’ve seen with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears, what is happening to bishops through all of this, and it is not pretty. The discrepancy between what can sometimes be said in public and what can be said in private is stark and ugly and leaves them vulnerable and, I suspect miserable. It is hard not to pity them, and pity is such a violent emotion.

Sometimes, when it seems as though some bishops have become incapable of telling truths even about things that matter little, we need to remember the pressures on them. No wonder they ask us to pray for them every day.